• Neither marriage, nor kinship, nor friendship, nor neighborhood can exist with a life expectancy that is merely convenient.

• Separate from the relationships, there is nobody to be know; people become, as they say and feel, nobodies

• It is only to the people who know us, love us, and depend on us that we are indispensable as the persons we uniquely are.

• Our obsolescence, both as individuals and as humankind, is fast growing upon us. But we cannot regret or, indeed, even know that this is true without knowing and naming those never-to-be-official institutions that alone have the power to reestablish us in our true estate and identity: marriage, family, household, friendship, neighborhood, community.

Wendell Berry "Men and Women in Search of Common Ground" Home Economics, 1987